Eating (7 page)

I also like to serve as a canapé my version—there are countless others—of clams casino. For these you should ask the fishmonger for small cherrystone clams or largish littlenecks, which are called “top necks” on Long Island. You will need three or four per guest. If you can’t open them yourself, ask the fishmonger to open them for you. Opening them is easy enough once you get used to it, but it takes some practice. You will need a clam knife. I prefer the kind with a somewhat flexible, thin blade. Don’t use an ordinary knife. If you
are right-handed, hold the clam in your left hand, against the thumb joint, using your thumb as a clamp. You will notice that the clam is shaped rather like an ear, tightly curled at the top. Look carefully for where the two shells join at the top of this ear. The point is to hold the blade of your clam knife in your right hand (again, if you are right-handed) vertically against this notch, which is not always easy to find, and press the blade with the fingers of your left hand firmly into the notch. Adjust the clam in your hand for maximum leverage. Once you have wedged the blade firmly between the shells, turn the blade ninety degrees and twist the shells apart. Then cut the muscle which attaches the clam to the top shell, and discard the top shell. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t succeed the first or even the fifth time. You will eventually get the hang of it. Another solution is simply to put the unopened clams in a dry pan in a medium oven for ten minutes or so, until they begin to open by themselves. Since you are going to put the clams under the broiler eventually, this unorthodox method won’t substantially change the result, but you will not have had the pleasure of going mano a mano with a clam. If you plan to serve the clams raw, on the half-shell, and they don’t open easily, put them on ice in your freezer for ten minutes or so, and then pry them open. Clam openers at raw bars use this trick.

For my version of two dozen clams casino, you will need a green bell pepper; a sweet onion;a small jar of pimientos or a red bell pepper blistered over a flame, skinned, and diced;a jalapeño;some lemon juice;a half-stick of softened
unsalted butter; Worcestershire sauce;and four slices of bacon. Remove the top and bottom and scrape out the seeds from the bell pepper, and cut it into thin julienne strips. Then cut the strips into fine dice. Dice the onion similarly, and chop the pimiento or skinned red bell pepper. There should be roughly equal amounts of each vegetable. Mince the jalapeño extra-fine (no seeds), and add it to the mix. Now wash your hands, lest you inadvertently rub your eyes. Mash two tablespoons or so of softened butter, and an equal amount of Worcestershire, into the vegetable mix. Meanwhile, cut four slices of good bacon into twenty-four pieces and soften them in a pan over a medium flame. Mix a tablespoon of bacon fat into the filling, and place a generous pinch or two on each opened clam, topping each with the softened bacon. Place the clams on a broiler pan, and put them in the refrigerator until you are ready to heat and serve them. When ready to serve, put the clams under a medium broiler until the bacon is crisp but before it burns, and serve while hot. You may want to experiment a bit with the mix.

There are countless varieties of clams, but for practical purposes in the northeastern United States there are only two: hard-shell and soft-shell. Manilla clams, which I prefer for pasta with clam sauce, are imported from the West Coast. Hard-shell clams are the littlenecks (smallest), cherrystones (larger), and chowders or quahogs (pronounced “co-hogs”), the largest, found in most East Coast fish markets. They are eaten raw on the half-shell, or stuffed with oregano and bread crumbs and baked, or
as clams casino, or with pasta, though the much smaller manilla clams are more subtle and intense with pasta. Soft-shell clams are less often seen in New York markets but are common in New England, where they are steamed or fried. Hard-shell clams are also steamed, usually with a celery stalk and a sprinkle of chopped parsley, and the two varieties are interchangeable in chowders, but only soft-shell clams are fried. They are eaten raw only by seagulls.

Soft-shells are easier to open than hard-shell clams, but their shells tend to crumble. This is a problem if you want to fry them, which requires that you shuck them first. But if you’re careful, you can open them gently by trimming away the membrane that holds the top and bottom shells together and delicately cutting the muscle that holds the clam to its shell. Then remove and discard the black sheath covering the neck, and dip each clam in cool water to get rid of the sand. For frying, you should look for smaller clams, two inches or so from top to bottom. They are easier to eat. Save the larger ones for steaming. Dip the clams in buttermilk or condensed or plain milk and then toss them to coat in a mixture of one-third all-purpose wheat flour and two-thirds corn flour and a pinch of fine sea salt. In a colander, shake off the excess. The battered clams will become soggy unless they are fried at once. Drop them immediately, one by one, into a fry basket, and drop the basket into corn, peanut, or canola oil at 360 degrees, cooking for a minute or so, just until they are
the color of a paper bag. They will fry more quickly after the first batch. Drain them on paper towels. If I’m frying a lot of clams, I set a sheet pan on the stove beside my fry pot, line it with paper towels, and drop the fried clams on it. The classic accompaniment is tartar sauce made from a cup of Hellmann’s mayonnaise, chopped pickle relish, a tablespoon of capers, drained, lemon juice, a little chopped onion or shallot, and a tablespoon of Dijon mustard.

So-called Ipswich clams are soft-shell clams dug mostly from the coastal mudflats north of Boston. The rich mud provides their unique sweetness, noticeably different from their bland cousins dug from sandy bottoms. But genuine Ipswich clams have been scarce lately, and most clams sold under that name are harvested from mudflats along the Maine coast. The shells of clams dug from mud tend to be darker than those dug from sand. Occasionally the Seafood Shop in Wainscott, Long Island, has these darker clams, and though they are a long way from Ipswich, their greater intensity is noticeable. My fried clams are much more delicate than the heavily battered, more durable version sold by roadside stands. They should be eaten while still warm. With fried squid, oysters, and whitebait, if you can find it, they make a great fritto misto.

For steamed soft-shell clams, simply rinse the clams under the faucet to wash away the sand, and place the clams in a covered pot over a medium flame. In five minutes or so, the shells will have opened. Scoop up the clams from the pot with a Chinese strainer
and drop them into a serving bowl. Strain the broth from the pot into as many mugs as you have guests, and serve each guest a small cup of melted butter. Guests should remove the clams from their shells and slip off and discard the black membrane from the neck. Then they should dip the clam into the broth to remove any remaining sand, and from there into the butter.

My mother, who needed no lessons in self-esteem, enjoyed, in her damp, drizzly November moods, taunting my father with the claim that she had agreed to their courtship only when he offered to treat her to fried Ipswich clams at Hugo’s Lighthouse Restaurant on Boston’s South Shore. Thus I learned at a vulnerable age that because of a fried clam I am. Perhaps this is why New York, where Ipswich clams are hard to find, still doesn’t seem, after so many years, like home.

O
n the morning of December 30, 1953, my first wife, Barbara, and I were married at a friend’s apartment in Morningside Heights in upper Manhattan, adjacent to Columbia University, from which I had graduated in 1949, with no idea what to do with the rest of my life and in no hurry to find out. At Columbia my friends and I read and studied literature as a kind of religion, an inexhaustible source of wisdom, we believed, to which we became addicted: Plato, the unknown authors of Ecclesiastes and Job, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Gibbon, Tolstoy. I wanted only to read, and after graduation that’s what I did that summer, at a lakeside cabin, alone in Oakland, Maine, with Proust, Balzac, and Gibbon and, at bedtime, Yeats, whose concern for the fragility of cultures and their artifacts I share. I was too much in awe of the writers I worshipped to think that I might become a writer myself,
but after a pointless year in graduate school, I was ready to leave the academy. My favorite pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus, said that character is fate: we become what we are. So, relying upon Heraclitus, I wandered into the book-publishing business and became a valet and evangelist for writers.

This unexpected vocation explains why Barbara and I were speeding, after our wedding, down Manhattan’s West Side Highway, beside the sparkling Hudson, under a brilliant windswept sky, to the pier where the stately
Ile de France,
its old-fashioned perpendicular bows towering over the highway, was preparing to sail at noon. We had booked a first-class cabin. Neither of us had money, but two years previously I had suggested to the publishing company where I worked that, with the market for books bound to expand as a result of the GI Bill, the kinds of books my classmates were reading would sell many more copies as inexpensive but well-made paperbacks than as expensive hardcovers, which students could not afford. There was nothing new about my idea. European publishers had been publishing serious books in paperback, the kind I had in mind, for years. But in the United States at that time, paperback books, except for a few imported Penguins, were mostly ephemera sold in drugstores and at newsstands and removed at the end of each month along with that month’s magazines, to be replaced with next month’s thrillers, mysteries, and westerns. My plan to publish important books on good paper, slightly larger than
drugstore paperbacks, and stock them permanently in bookstores, succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations, including my own, and this voyage was my reward for having precipitated what came to be called the paperback revolution.

In those pre-jet days, when all but the most intrepid transatlantic travelers sailed to Europe, book publishers went first-class. Book publishing has never been a very profitable business. To make money, you went to work in a bank. Book publishing was a vocation. Without money you might go hungry. Without books you would not know who you are or where you came from or where you might be going. For me and many others, the work we did in those years was its own reward. The annual three-week scouting trip to England and the Continent by sea was a traditional perquisite. First-class passage was compensation for monastic wages. Barbara and I were going to meet the important postwar European writers. We were twenty-five and fearless. We would be gone not for the prescribed three weeks but for three months.

First-class passengers took an elevator to the upper level of a covered West Side pier and crossed a broad, red-carpeted gangplank onto the ship. There were confetti and streamers; bellboys in pillbox hats with chin straps, delivering bouquets; porters in berets and the insignia “CGT” in red concentric circles on their blue sweaters; pages shouting names and waving telegrams; chimes warning visitors that they would soon have to go ashore. Did I imagine it or did I see Van Johnson, the
actor, a camel’s-hair coat over his shoulders, retreating down the gangplank backward, waving? I remember the buttery aroma of fresh croissants, which I have ever since associated with that voyage. The
Ile de France
would prove to be a seagoing patisserie.

Our cabin was not large, but spacious enough not to be overwhelmed by its walls of silk brocade, the Louis XV chairs, or the pink silk lampshades. I have a photograph of Barbara in a gray suit, hat, and veil sitting on the arm of one of these chairs. I’m standing behind her. Barbara seems stunned. I’m smiling. My confidence was not ill-founded. Our generation of Americans had every reason to trust the future. Hitler and the Japanese, as we had never doubted, were defeated. The war in Korea was an anomaly and far away. The imperial troubles to come were not yet in sight. I had been rejected for the Korean draft when the examining doctor asked when I had had polio. I said never. He said, “Think again,” and then I remembered my eighth or ninth summer, when I came down with a fever which my father said was the grippe. It had never occurred to me that this might have been polio, nor did my parents tell me. The doctor said that my right foot had been affected, something I had not previously noticed. Before I could dispute his diagnosis, I was asked to leave the line of candidates and go home. I disliked being rejected, but on reflection chose not to pursue the issue. Perhaps the doctor decided that the army would be better off without me. Our marriage proved bountiful.
Though after many years it ended, the love we celebrated that day survives, undiminished after Barbara’s death last year.

By the time we found our way to the cabin, our friends had already arrived to say goodbye and spilled out onto the corridor. I remember yellow orchids and champagne splits in a silver tub of ice, bits of conversation. Then they left, and I was alone on the afterdeck looking down at the tugs as they backed the ship away from the pier and into the Hudson.

The next day was stormy. By late afternoon, the
Ile de France,
which had seemed so sturdy when its old-fashioned bows towered over the West Side Highway, was laboring through messy seas. Wrapped in blankets in a deck chair on the glassed-in promenade, I watched the ocean seem to rise almost to the level of the deck and then fall steeply away. Chopin and Satie drifted down from hidden speakers. Lunch, served on deck, had been chicken sandwiches, smoked salmon, and Chablis. I was reading the Maude translation of
War and Peace.
Edmund Wilson, the distinguished literary critic and essayist, was also aboard, with his wife, Elena. He was on his way to Israel to write about the Dead Sea Scrolls for
The New Yorker.
Wilson’s abundant output in those years required the services of several publishers. I was one of them, and we had become friends. That evening, Edmund and Elena joined us at the New Year’s Eve gala in the first-class dining room, with its grand double staircase and double-height ceiling. We had been
assigned a table for six, and when the four of us arrived we found the great comic actor Buster Keaton and his wife in the other two seats. Keaton seemed uncomfortable in his tuxedo and old-fashioned starched collar. He barely spoke, oblivious to the pitching and rolling ship, unblinking, his mouth a horizontal slit, his eyes straight ahead, as deadpan as the character he played. He seemed to have no idea that Wilson in his world was as distinguished as himself in his. But when Wilson, a gifted prestidigitator who was juggling several festive cotton balls handed out at ships’ galas in those days, suggested to Keaton that he might perform for the passengers, Keaton replied politely but without expression, “No props,” and silently began juggling some cotton balls himself. I remember crêpes Suzette and cherries jubilee aflame as waiters struggled to remain upright beneath their trays, amid fox-trotters sliding this way and that across the polished floor, as the ship rose and fell through violent seas. “No props,” indeed.